Loathing the Preacher Man.

I’ve now reached the last few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the final season has been desperately dark.

Buffy’s current antagonist is not a vampire, a demon, or some other supernatural denizen of the pit, but he is the worst kind of devil incarnate so far encountered. He’s a smartly dressed and not unattractive man wearing a dog collar and speaking with a Deep South accent, and he’s very nasty. So nasty, in fact, that his presence disturbs me more than I would have thought possible.

So why should I be so deeply disturbed by a mere fiction? The image, that’s why. It left me with a sense that of all the nastiest and most dangerous creatures on earth, a smartly dressed man wearing a dog collar and speaking with a Deep South accent is among the most frightful of all.